he needed to find different middle ground on this fiscal cliff issue. he particularly cited your report which he described as providing imperfect but fair middle ground as a way of breaking this political stalemate. he's saying only the president would adopt your approach that maybe this stalemate could be broken. what do you think about that? >> (laughing) well, i haven't seen the letter, as i think you know. it's nice that the speaker would give me some credit for trying to do that. but what he is referring to is when i testified before the super committee, i tried to show these guys that if they truly wanted to ghettoing that they could ghettoing at that time. and basically as an example on discretionary spending they were talking about cuts between $200-$400 billion. look, ghettoing on $300 billion. on health care between $500 billion and $700 billion. there was $600 billion. another mandatory that got that number that came out is $300 billion. both were talking about changing to the superlative c.p.i. so you could get $200 billion there and you'd h